Description
Product ID: | 9780812248784 |
Product Form: | Hardback |
Country of Manufacture: | GB |
Series: | Contemporary Ethnography |
Title: | Creative Urbanity |
Subtitle: | An Italian Middle Class in the Shade of Revitalization |
Authors: | Author: Emanuela Guano |
Page Count: | 248 |
Subjects: | Social classes, Social classes, Social and cultural anthropology, Social & cultural anthropology, ethnography, Italy |
Description: | Select Guide Rating Based on more than a decade of ethnographic research in Genoa, Italy, Creative Urbanity argues for an understanding of contemporary urban life that refuses scholarly condemnation of urban lifestyles and consumption and casts a fresh light on an oft-neglected social group-the middle class. In the 1970s, the city of Genoa in northern Italy was suffering the economic decline and the despondency common to industrial centers of the Western world at that time. Deindustrialization made Genoa a bleak, dangerous, angry city, where the unemployment rate rose alongside increasing political violence and crime and led to a massive population loss as residents fled to find jobs and a safer life elsewhere. But by the 1990s a revitalization was under way. Many Genoese came to believe their city was poised for a renaissance as a cultural tourism destination and again began to appreciate the sensory, aesthetic, and cultural facets of Genoa, refining practices of a cultured urbanity that had long been missing. Some of those people—educated, middle class—seeking to escape intellectual unemployment, transformed urbanity into a source of income, becoming purveyors of symbolic goods and cultural services, as walking tour guides, street antiques dealers, artisans, festival organizers, small business owners, and more, thereby burnishing Genoa''s image as a city of culture and contributing to its continued revival. |
Imprint Name: | University of Pennsylvania Press |
Publisher Name: | University of Pennsylvania Press |
Country of Publication: | GB |
Publishing Date: | 2016-12-20 |